An Observation on Communication

I noticed this the other day as I was explaining, for the umpteenth time, what I do as part of my Ph.D.:

I suppose I really shouldn't be complaining about people being eternally interested in what I do, but it does get a little tiring explaining (what are, ultimately, some fairly esoteric and difficult concepts) over and over again to new people. At least I'll have lots of practice! A hui hou!

Edit (6/3/22): It has occurred to me, in the interim, that the joke would be even better (and much more realistic) with the person on the left saying “Wow! I didn't understand a word of that!” at the end, in both panels. Ah well.

An August Astrobite

Grad school and other things have kept me intensely busy this past week, which is why I'm just posting about an Astrobite I wrote on the 8th. I'll say upfront that I don't think this is my best work; not that it's particularly bad or under my standards for writing, I just realized over the course of writing it that I wasn't quite as interested in the subject matter as I thought when I started.

It's still reasonably interesting however, the subject matter being that when the authors examined a baker's dozen supernovae type Ia (that's “type one-A,” not “type eee-AA!”) which had been caught very early in their brightening stage they found evidence for two distinct populations when looking at the color of their spectra. “Color” in this case is an astronomical term for summing up the flux in two different filters that cover different spectral ranges and subtracting them, leaving a single number to represent the color. Most commonly the “Blue” and “Visible” filters are used to get what's known as a \(B-V\) color (visible here meaning roughly “green”), but any two filters in any part of the spectrum can work. Basically, some of the supernovae looked “red” and some looked “blue,” though the differences disappeared after about four or five days since the explosion.

Most supernovae aren't caught this early, which is why they had so few to work with despite there being hundreds of known type Ia supernovae. Interestingly, in a bit of a personal connection to the paper, one of the supernovae they looked at was SN 2011fe—which I actually got a picture of while in Hawaii! I didn't realize this until after I'd chosen the paper and started writing it up.

Messier 101 with SN 2011fe marked with the green dots.

If there's one thing I learned while doing background research on supernovae type Ia for this Astrobite, it's that we still have much to learn about these enigmatic explosions. A hui hou!

Personal Panoramic History, Part 7: 2014

I thought 2013 (covered previously here) was a slow year for panoramas, but I think 2014 has it beat. The first photos I found that could be put together were all the way in…

September

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In September a friend and I hiked into Pololū Valley, and along the way we stopped at the overlook for Waipiʻo Valley. These two valleys are the ends of a chain of huge valleys that cut into the northeastern face of the remains of the Kohala volcano, the oldest and northernmost of the five sub-aerial (i.e., above sea level) volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaiʻi. There are some seven major valleys and dozens of small ones, and the whole area is among the least accessible on the island. There's a car-traversable road into Waipiʻo Valley, but accessing the other valleys requires either hiking up and back down several-hundred-feet cliff walls multiple times, or a canoe.

Here's the Waipiʻo Valley overlook. In Ancient Hawaiʻi these valleys were significant population centers, but this is the only one people still inhabit today.

After stopping there we drove around to the north end of the island and came down the coast to Pololū Valley, where this panorama was taken. This is the view from the parking lot at the overlook at the start of the footpath down into the valley. This is definitely one of my favorite panoramas I've taken, I think; it just came out really nicely. It was just three photos, taken almost on the spur of the moment.

This panorama comes from about halfway down the footpath into the valley. You can see the same headland and rocks in the water that are visible in the picture above. You can also see that the clouds to the west were starting to come in and cover the brilliant blue sky to east. Luckily we didn't get rained up, but it got a lot grayer after this!

November

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In November I took my second trip to see Lake Waiau near the summit of Mauna Kea, and took the opportunity to take some more panoramas.

Here's one from slightly up the edge of the crater that the lake sits in. I didn't notice the two hikers at the far right on the crater rim until after I'd assembled the panorama, but they give you a (very poor) sense of scale.

And here's a panorama from by the shore. The lake was a lot more full this time than it was when I visited it the first time back in 2011. I don't think it gets much more full than this, however, as I believe it starts to spill out the west side of the crater directly opposite from where these photos were taken if the lake level gets any higher.

And that's it for 2014, a rather slow year in the photo-taking department. Well, at least when it comes to turning photos into panoramas. 2015 will be a bit short as well, but it does have a few nice ones that I hadn't put together before finding Hugin and thus haven't shown before, including some more from Oregon. A hui hou!